Editors for Linux Cluster

Choose an editor for the CAC linux cluster from among these three types.
The simpler editors are immediately easy to use. The vi and emacs editors
offer lots of capabilities but require time to learn in order to access those capabilities.

Contents

Editors in the Terminal Window

nano - Very simple. Type "nano" at the command prompt. The menus are self-explanatory.

vi - The most common editor on all systems. Easy to learn the very basics from SimpleViDirections, and then much more complicated after that.

Editors which Require X-Windows

gedit - Simple, and it looks like notepad. Start with "gedit&" at the command prompt. Not on the compute nodes.

emacs - Like vi, this editor is worth choosing if you take time to memorize lots of commands.

Remote Editors

For someone unfamiliar with Linux, these editors may be the simplest choice.
Both of these editors run on your computer but connect to linuxlogin1.cac.cornell.edu to transfer the file every time you save it. They do not need X-Windows.

EditPlus on Windows - This is shareware. Some setup is required, described in Using EditPlus.

Programming Environments

If you are writing code, then try Eclipse. It is a fully-featured integrated development environment, or IDE, which works for Java, C++, even Fortran. On our system, it is installed under /opt/eclipse.